In
the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away from the nearest
population center, lies Easter Island, a strange and
mysterious place famous for what happened there many years
before and what kind of evidence has been left
behind.

The
island, called Rapa Nui in the local language, got
its English-language name from Holland's Captain Jacob
Roggeveen, who landed there on Easter Sunday in 1722.
Roggeveen found a strange culture and even stranger huge
structures called Moai, face-like giant rocks that
dotted the coastlines, as if guarding the island's people
from intruders.

Since
that time, scholars have asked two important questions about
Easter Island:

1) How did the people get
there? Were they always there, or did they come from
somewhere else?

2) How did they build such
massive rocks and transport them from the quarries where
they were built to the clifftops where they were ultimately
found?

Historians
still can't agree on where the island's original people came
from, although most people think that they came from
somewhere else. Did they sail from Peru, thousands of miles
to the east? Did they sail from Hawaii or a Polynesian
island, thousands of miles to the west or northwest? No one
really knows for sure, although many people have evidence
for their theories, including similarities to both Peruvian
and Polynesian cultures.

As
for the moai, these 13-foot-tall, 14-ton stone
carvings present an entirely different kind of mystery.
Historians think that the inhabitants of Easter Island built
and transported the giant stone carvings between 1400 and
1600 A.D. But how did they do it? And why did they do
it?

In
all, 887 moai have been located on the island. Only
288 of those were moved; the rest were either still in the
quarries or were en route to the clifftop watch locations of
the others. The ones that were moved, historians think, were
moved on wooden logs used as rollers, much like historians
now think the ancient Egyptians moved the giant stones that
made up the Pyramids. Using a series of rollers and ropes,
the Rapa Nui (the name for the people as well as the
island) got the large stones from the quarries to the
cliffs. Then, it was just a matter of getting them to stand
up.

Historians
now think that the Rapa Nui used levers and ropes and
built stone ramps on which to move the moai into an
upright position.

Why
did the people of Easter Island make all these statues? Why
did they clear lots of good farmland so they could drag the
giant stones through it on the way to the sentinel
positions?

Historians
now think that it had something to do with the religion that
the Rapa Nui practiced, that the stones were
representative of the spirits of the chieftains and the
gods. The stones themselves don't all look alike, but they
follow a large handful of patterns. Archaeologists think
that the patterns were close to how the Rapa Nui
chieftains looked.

As
for the Rapa Nui themselves, they gradually died out,
from a combination of in-fighting and exposure to the rest
of civilization. As many as 10,000 people once lived on the
island at once, historians think. Civil wars (which also
made the moai targets) and plagues have considerably
reduced that number. Today, the descendants of those people
number in the hundreds. Today's Rapa Nui keep alive
their traditions and stories, however, and archaeological
efforts in recent years have protected the moai from
further destruction.